Fall Book Preview Most-Anticipated Books of Fall 2016

Fall Book Preview Most-Anticipated Books of Fall 2016

32 new books to add to your reading list

In the decade since Jonathan Safran Foer’s last novel was published, he became the father of two boys, got divorced, tried his hand at writing for TV and, just before production on the show was set to begin, decided he preferred writing books.

His new novel, "Here I Am," will be published next week by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Its precipitating event is the same as that of Mr. Foer’s abandoned TV project: the discovery of a clandestine cellphone.

The novel, Mr. Foer said, reflects how he has changed over the past 10 years. "Here I Am" presents difficult choices. It follows Jacob and Julia Bloch, a Washington, D.C., couple considering a divorce. At the same time, an earthquake in the Middle East sets off a geopolitical crisis and, as war breaks out, Israel calls American Jews to come and defend the Jewish state. Jacob, a TV writer and the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, must decide whether to go and fight.

The idea for the extremely unusual narrator of Ian McEwan’s new novel “Nutshell” first came to him while he was chatting with his pregnant daughter-in-law. “We were talking about the baby, and I was very much aware of the baby as a presence in the room,” he recalls. He jotted down a few notes, and soon afterward, daydreaming in a long meeting, the first sentence of the novel popped into his head: “So here I am, upside down in a woman.”

For two decades, Amor Towles helped build Select Equity Group into a firm that now manages over $18 billion in assets. But all the while, he dreamt of writing. Now, the former Wall Street director of research is a best-selling author about to release his second novel, “A Gentleman in Moscow,” with an announced first printing of 200,000 copies, and has two more under contract.

The author has his first career to thank for the idea that sprouted his second novel. “A Gentleman in Moscow,” coming Sept. 6 from Viking, chronicles 32 years in the life of a Russian aristocrat forced to live out his days in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. On a business trip in 2009, Mr. Towles found himself observing some of the same people he’d seen over the years during his stays at Geneva’s Le Richemond, musing on the idea of a character trapped inside a hotel. Russia—a country and culture that has long fascinated the author, and a place where house arrest has existed since the time of the czars—was the obvious setting, he says.

The novel opens in 1922, when Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is called before a Bolshevik tribunal. He is deemed an “unrepentant aristocrat,” marched across Red Square to the Metropol and warned that if he ever sets foot outside again, he’ll be shot. Over the decades, the count finds new ways to adjust to his situation, discovering hidden corners of the bustling hotel and creating lasting bonds with both its employees and guests, including 9-year-old Nina, a sort of Eloise of Moscow, inspired in part by Mr. Towles’s own daughter.

At a dance class in northwest London, two young girls bond over a shared skin tone and the dream of performance. In her latest, the author of "White Teeth" and "NW" turns her attention on female friendship--of the complicated, thorny variety. Just one of the girls, Tracey, has perfect arched feet and talent while the other, the narrator, becomes personal assistant to a high-profile pop star. Steeped in the history of music, and peppered by a dissection of pop-culture, the story explores the narrator’s ideas "about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free."

Penny Baker makes her first appearance as a 12-year-old girl lying naked in a sweat lodge, puffing on a cigarette atop a heap of animal skins. Years later, as a young college graduate with a business degree, she thinks she has left her hippie upbringing behind. But when she stumbles onto a band of free-spirited smokers’-rights advocates squatting in her newly inherited family home, she quickly falls for them.

Candice Millard has developed a distinctive approach to writing about historical giants. She focuses tightly on a forgotten yet riveting episode in an extremely well-documented life.

For her latest book, Ms. Millard tackles one of modern history’s most chronicled figures, Winston Churchill. By one count, there are more than 12,000 books written about Churchill. Ms. Millard’s “Hero of the Empire” recounts a forgotten episode in a forgotten war: young Winston Churchill’s capture and dramatic escape during the Boer War.

The author of "Bel Canto" and "State of Wonder" recalls elements of her own experiences as a child of divorce in this family epic. The story begins with the breakup of two marriages and follows the tribe of kids left shuttling between their divorced parents, bound together in secrecy after one is accidentally killed. Ms. Patchett’s book tour should hit more than 25 cities. "It’s probably the most commercial novel Ann has written yet," said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins’s Harper imprint.

In his first memoir, David John Moore Cornwell, the former British intelligence agent better known as novelist John le Carré, shares stories from a life full of intrigue. At one point, Mr. Cornwell found himself in the jungle around Phnom Penh, Cambodia, helping aid worker Yvette Pierpaoli rescue children threatened by communist revolutionary Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge movement. Pierpaoli enlisted small aircraft flown by colorful pilots who worked for her import business. Some had flown for the CIA, others had trafficked opium. One taught Mr. Cornwell how to land the plane in case the pilot was too high on morphine. That pilot became Charlie Marshall in “The Honourable Schoolboy” and Pierpaoli herself inspired Tessa Quayle in “The Constant Gardener.”

The short but juicy foreword to the Boss’s autobiography, posted on Facebook, hints that there are secrets yet to be uncovered about the New Jersey rocker. The 66-year-old singer has been the subject of countless profiles and several biographies, including Peter Ames Carlin’s 2012 book "Bruce." At concerts, the artist himself often regales the audience with personal anecdotes. However, Springsteen allows that all might not be as it seems in his ragamuffin mythos. "I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud," he writes. "So am I."

England’s Queen Victoria, though immortalized in widow’s weeds in somber portraits, was in fact a passionate wife and then single mother with a lively sense of humor. After taking the throne in 1837 at age 18, she fell for her cousin, Albert, a German prince, proposed to him and formed a partnership that produced nine children and ended with his death in 1861. The tireless Albert aspired to be much more than a consort but Victoria made clear from the get-go who wore the crown. The monarch, whose nearly 64-year reign over the U.K. has been surpassed in length only by her great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II, airily pared the two-week honeymoon her fiancé wanted to two or three days, writing: "You forget, my dearest Love, that I am the Sovereign, and that business can stop and wait for nothing."

What isn’t astonishing in this tale? In 1932, the wife of the man about to become president fell in love with a campaign-trail reporter assigned to cover her. As the initially reluctant First Lady assumed her public role, she invited the reporter to move into the White House—where she slept in a nearby bedroom for the next 13 years. The First Lady was Eleanor Roosevelt and her friend was Lorena ‘Hick’ Hickok, a journalist who went on to write for the Works Progress Administration. Although Eleanor was a child of privilege and Hick of privation, their bond endured for the rest of their lives.

Feng Danlin, an investigative reporter for a Chinese news agency in New York, hates his ex-wife. Seven years earlier, she dumped him, leaving him sobbing into the pillows of a Chinatown hotel room. Now that "heartless woman," Yan Haili, is courting celebrity with a suspiciously overhyped novel that exploits 9/11. Danlin tries to prove the Chinese government is using his ex-wife in a broader scheme to manipulate the media in this grimly comic novel by National Book Award winner Ha Jin.

Japanese-American author Joe Ide grew up in South Central Los Angeles loving hip hop and Sherlock Holmes. His debut novel, "IQ," combines the two: Isaiah Quintabe, a gifted high school dropout with a turbulent past solves neighborhood crimes in exchange for baked goods, car tires, whatever his clients can afford. So when a questionable figure from his past comes along with a high-paying job investigating the attempted murder of a rap star, Isaiah is hardly in a position to refuse. Mr. Ide, 57, spent two decades writing screenplays for Hollywood without ever getting a movie made. Publisher Mulholland Books has ordered 40,000 copies of "IQ," the first in a series.

This debut novel begins with a gut-wrenching scene, in which a 6-year-old has his arm amputated. Other striking moments, all calmly told in meticulous detail, follow: a woman compulsively eating sand, a man searching for his missing limb, the ritual of a bowel movement made sacred during wartime. It is in this harsh environment--the end of the Sri Lankan civil war--that the book’s ruminative protagonist Dinesh accepts a proposal of marriage. The story follows the union of Dinesh, who works in an under-resourced clinic, and his new wife Ganga. In lengthy, precise sentences, the 27-year-old Sri Lankan author explores the importance of ritual and the body, alongside unthinkable suffering.

Four men and four women lock themselves inside a 3-acre ecosphere. Before long, rivalries, intrigue and hanky-panky follow. Mr. Boyle’s 16th novel is based on the biosphere experiments of the 1990s. In his version, the Terranauts are sealed under glass in the fictional "E2" environment in the Arizona desert, equal parts prototype for life on another planet and extended publicity stunt. Mr. Boyle recently wrote on his blog that a deal to make "The Terranauts" into a cable-television series had been finalized.

In sentences that can stretch to nearly a page, the Spanish bestseller explores the country’s civil war through the lens of a dysfunctional marriage. 23-year-old Juan de Vere takes a job as assistant to the enigmatic, eye-patch wearing film director Eduardo Muriel. He is soon asked to spy on a mysterious family friend, opening up a network of secrets related to his employer’s wife, Beatriz. Complications ensue. The Madrid-based author’s first novel since 2013’s "The Infatuations," it takes its title from Hamlet: "I must be cruel only to be kind / thus bad begins and worse remains behind."

The comic novel begins with a disastrous performance of the musical-theater adaptation of a beloved children’s book called "Mister Monkey." Before an audience of kids, Adam, a hormonal tween in a monkey suit, gets sexually aggressive on stage with the classically trained actress Margot. Each character furthers the plot with an inner soliloquy that takes readers into more weighty territory. The novel also includes what HarperCollins editor Terry Karten calls "probably the worst first date in literary history."

Ms. Bennett’s essay "I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People" went viral in 2014, written as the Black Lives Matter movement swept the country. Now comes the 26-year-old writer’s debut novel, a work she started in her late teens that follows a young beauty who gets pregnant by the pastor’s son, heads to the local abortion clinic and holds the episode’s "sour secret" into adulthood. "It has what a debut needs most—a strong and very distinctive voice," said Geoffrey Kloske, publisher of Riverhead Books.

This debut novel tackles a horrific subject: twin sisters who endure Josef Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz and then become separated. Booksellers have been buzzing about it since BookExpo America in May, calling the prose "lyrical," "magical," "inventive, and even occasionally playful." The twins, Pearl and Stasha, tell their stories in alternating chapters. At the camp, they divide the responsibilities of living: "Stasha would take the funny, the future, the bad. I would take the sad, the past, the good." Little, Brown and Co.’s Lee Boudreaux Books imprint ordered an initial print run of 75,000 copies.

The Israeli writer’s memoir, "A Tale of Love and Darkness," hit movie theaters in August in an adaptation written and directed by Natalie Portman. Now comes the English-language edition of his latest novel, "Judas," which was published in Hebrew in 2014. Set in Jerusalem in the winter of 1959 and 1960, it explores Israel’s founding after World War II through the interplay of five characters – three living and two dead.

The thirteenth novel by Ms. Tremain is told in three parts spanning six decades. It begins in Switzerland in the 1950s, as the country is emerging from World War II. The protagonist Gustav Perle, whose widowed mother urges him to show restraint and neutrality "like Switzerland," forges a childhood friendship with a Jewish boy in his class. Reviewing the book for the Guardian, Marcel Theroux described it as "a masterclass in naturalistic fiction: spare, deeply imagined and full of small gestures that draw the reader in towards deeper mysteries."

In 1945, a decade before 14-year-old Emmett Till was killed in Mississippi for allegedly propositioning a white woman, his father, Private Louis Till, was hanged by the U.S. military for rape and murder while serving in Italy. The victims in the father’s case could not identify their assailants, and no murder weapon was found, but witnesses testified that by the light of a match they could see that the attackers’ faces were black.

Jane Jacobs, the author and activist who spared swaths of Manhattan and Toronto from bulldozers, was an atrocious student. Born 100 years ago in Scranton, Pa., she was often tardy and occasionally suspended. In 1933, her exasperated mother allowed that the highlight of her year had been "getting Jane through high school." Jacobs, who never finished college, wrote works including 1961’s seminal "The Death and Life of American Cities." The bête-noire of New York planner Robert Moses, she is believed have met her nemesis in person only once.

During Reconstruction, as many Northerners stepped back from support for African-Americans in the South, President Ulysses S. Grant ignored his own cabinet’s advice and took aim at the Ku Klux Klan’s violent intimidation of black voters. He pushed through legislation empowering the president to use the military to enforce the 14th amendment and appointed the nation’s first solicitor general to conduct government lawsuits. In 1871 alone, federal grand juries brought 3,000 indictments.

Thomas De Quincey, the swooning and diminutive (he was 4'11") author of "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," was obsessed with murder. He was 26 years old when the Ratcliffe Highway Murders took place in 1811. He followed them obsessively, penning a series of essays on the subject of death. Critic and addict, melodramatic groupie of Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge (for weeks, he crouched on the grave of Wordsworth’s daughter, mourning), De Quincey was fascinated by the mind of a murderer. He was also fascinated by his own mind—sober or otherwise—and his musings gave rise to the modern addiction memoir.

Some of NASA’s greatest mathematicians were black women, segregated from their white counterparts and known as "colored computers" during the Jim Crow era. Margot Lee Shetterly’s "Hidden Figures" begins with the World War II labor shortage that ushered black women into the industry and continues through the Civil Rights era and the Space Race. The author traces how Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, Christine Darden and Dorothy Vaughan contributed to some of America’s biggest successes in space. A film adaptation, starring Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer, is due out this winter.

Renaissance Italy wasn’t solely the realm of white rulers. Consider Alessandro de’ Medici, the illegitimate son of Duke Lorenzo de’ Medici and a servant believed to be of African descent. Great-nephew of a Pope and son-in-law of the Holy Roman Emperor, Alessandro became ruler of Florence, a Medici stronghold, in 1531, when he was 19 years old. An enthusiast of fine silver, firearms and hunting, he had a thick-skinned rhinoceros engraved on his armor. Alessandro wore bespoke chain mail around the clock and is thought to have traded assassination attempts with one cousin, Ippolito—who died of poisoning—before being stabbed to death by another, Lorenzino, in 1537.

In 1942, a social worker named Irena Sendler was granted access to the Warsaw ghetto as a public-health specialist. Coordinating the efforts of about 20 people, she went on to save an estimated 2,500 children from the Nazis, smuggling them out of the walled district, finding safe homes for them, and keeping lists of their names buried in bottles under a friend’s apple tree. Ms. Mazzeo, author of the best-selling "The Widow Clicquot," draws from interviews with Sendler’s daughter and children she saved to offer new details on Sendler’s early life and her remarkable undertaking during World War II.

For much of her life, Sarah Kaminsky knew little of her father’s experiences in World War II aside from occasional references to him as a "fighter." When he was 77, she finally pushed him to reveal his secret: At 17 years old, because of his experience working with dyes at a dry cleaner, he was recruited by the French resistance to forge documents. He created papers that saved 14,000 Jews. He continued to lead a double life until the 1970s, forging IDs for people around the world whom he believed were being persecuted or oppressed. Ms. Kaminsky’s TED Talk has been watched more than 560,000 times.

A laboratory is a more compelling setting than a church. Life in the classroom trumps partying on campus and readers largely prefer novels with dogs in them, rather than cats.

These are just some of the patterns the authors of a new book,"The Bestseller Code," out Sept. 20, have detected through an algorithm they designed to identify the DNA of bestselling novels. For the last five years, Matthew L. Jockers, associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Jodie Archer, a former acquisitions editor for Penguin UK, have been scanning texts and compiling data. They claim the algorithm can pick out a future New York Times-list best seller with 80% accuracy.

Every independent bookstore is unique, according to Bob Eckstein, but many of them have resident cats, attract eccentric regulars and have inspired marriage proposals among the shelves. Mr. Eckstein, an illustrator, writer and New Yorker cartoonist, should know. For two years he has been working on illustrations for "Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores: True Tales and Lost Moments from Book Buyers, Booksellers, and Book Lovers," due Oct. 4.